This all-female ‘Goodfellas’ tries hard but never quite hits the target
The Kitchen 15 cert, 103 min
★★★★★ Dir Andrea Berloff
Starring Melissa Mccarthy, Tiffany Haddish, Elisabeth Moss, Domhnall Gleeson, Margo Martindale, Common
In cinema, women have rarely been allowed to control their own destinies. Yet this habitual injustice is slowly being corrected with the release of more and more films that put the female perspective front and centre.
There have been some successes. Steve Mcqueen and Gillian Flynn’s Widows, with its indomitable performances by Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez and Elizabeth Debicki, is one such example, and then there is the fearlessly lowbrow Girls Trip. Yet misfires have also occurred. You wanted to love Paul Feig’s feminised Ghostbusters, if only to annoy the tragic fanboys trolling the production. Alas, the movie was a drop-dead dud. Ocean’s 8, last year’s ladies’-night riff on Ocean’s 11, meanwhile, squandered a winning cast including Cate Blanchett and Sandra Bullock. The sad trombone now toots a third time with Andrea Berloff ’s underwhelming attempt at an all-female Goodfellas.
One of the problems with this adaptation of a well-regarded 2015 graphic novel, already a flop in the US, is straightforward miscasting. The always likeable Melissa Mccarthy stars as the downtrodden wife of a smalltime crook in Hell’s Kitchen, New York. But her irrepressibility, that ever-present hint of playfulness, makes her fundamentally ill-suited to the part of the ambitious and ruthless Kathy Brennan.
It’s the late Seventies and even as Scorsese and Coppola are immortalising New York as a gangsters’ paradise, times are changing. The Irish-american clans that for decades ruled Hell’s Kitchen struggle to maintain supremacy as new waves of migrants stream in. The outlook for Kathy and friends Ruby (Tiffany Haddish, a force of nature in the aforementioned Girls Trip) and Claire (Elisabeth Moss) turns even bleaker when their criminal husbands are banged up following a botched robbery.
Facing ruin, Kathy and her pals rejuvenate their spouses’ ailing protection racket. They do so simply by politely asking their neighbourhood businesses to cough up their dues. What the ailing Irishamerican underworld needed all along was a woman’s touch, it seems.
With cash rolling in, the trio are soon calling the shots over the local hoods. This brings the unwelcome attention of Ruby’s kingpin mother-inlaw (Margo Martindale) and FBI Agent Silvers (rapper Common). Cherishing her freedom from her physically abusive husband, Claire, meanwhile, takes up with string-bean hitman Gabriel (Domhnall Gleeson). He’s a Vietnam vet with a penchant for dismembering bodies in the bath and a traumatic past that draws him to the emotionally scarred mobster’s dame.
Everyone tries hard in their roles, but unfortunately, the leads appear to believe they’re in three very different films. Mccarthy seems forever on the brink of breaking into a grin. Haddish plays it gritty and straight as the scheming Ruby. Moss simply reprises her melodramatic turn from The Handmaid’s Tale. The tonal choppiness is reflected in Berloff ’s directing as she lurches from grisly body horror to girl power caper and harrowing soap opera. A clunking twist at the end undermines a great deal of what has gone before. But by that point it’s already clear just how little is cooking in the Kitchen.